





COMMEMORATIVE TRIBUTE TO 


Pewee VE DDER 


By JOHN C. VAN DYKE 


PREPARED FOR 
THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF 
ARTS AND LETTERS 
1924 





AMERICAN ACADEMY OF 
ARTS AND LETTERS 
633 WesT 155TH STREET 
NEW YORK 


1924 


= 





ELIHU VEDDER 
By Joun C. Van Dyke 


Vedder has written his own story 
in his Digressions of V and happily 
forestalled his obituarist. It is im- 
possible to be funereal in reading that 
story for it is full of humor, gaiety, 
and caprice. It wanders, rambles, 
digresses delightfully, and breaks off 
just when you expect him to say 
something serious about Rome and 
Raphael and academic drawing. He 
omits—how much he omits !—about 
|his art. But then we have the art 
itself to supplement the Digressions. 
If it were not so, if we held by the 
story alone, we might receive an in- 
adequate impression of the man. He 
smiles all through the book, but he 
smiles not at all in his art. The char- 
acters in his pictures are as world- 
worn as the Sibyls and Prophets on 


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the Sistine ceiling, as sorrow-laden 
as Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel, as 
Burne-Jones’s Angel of the Annuncia- 
tion. 

Does that mean that Vedder was 
another Thomas Hood—smiling with- 
out but within consumed by sadness? 
By no means. He was one man 
socially and another man artistically. 
In dealing with the world he pre- 
ferred to use the social convention. 
Everyone, at his club, liked his good 
humor, his appropriate stories, his 
unique personality. But painting a 
picture was another matter. That 
called for serious, sober reflection. 
He shut the door, took counsel of the 
Muses, the Fates, the Sibyls, and let 
slip his romantic imagination. One 
gets from the Digressions little idea 
of this except as, now and then, he 
drops a casual remark that suggests 
what went on behind the door. He 
was poetic and romantic from his 


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boyhood. When, as a student in 
‘Sherburne, he went sketching he 
“sought for lofty granite peaks catch- 
ing the last rays of the sun, for hills 
convent-crowned or castles on abrupt 
cliffs frowning down on _ peaceful 
abbeys below.” He tells us: “I was 
always looking for things with a tinge 
Of romance in them,’ and “I had 
been reading Tennyson and my mind 
was full of the gleaming Excalibur.” 
And still further on: “I always try 
to embody my moods in some pic- 
ture.” : 

This paper trail of quotations leads 
straight to Vedder’s studio and sug- 
gests the young artist and his early 
art. Some of us are not so young 
that we cannot remember the talk 
that went the rounds concerning 
Meade: ss) air of the Sea Serpent, 
his Questioner of the Sphinx, and his 
Lost Mind. They had a weird imag- 
ination, a touch of the uncanny, that 


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caught the public fancy. Even down 
into the early eighties there was dis- 
cussion and explanation of those pic- 
tures. Who and what was the per- 
sonified Lost Mind? What was the 
Questioner asking the Sphinx? Was 
the Sea Serpent really painted from 
a large eel? Vedder says they were 
all done out of his head—his poetic, 
romantic head. It cannot be doubted. 
As a young man he was influenced |. 
by Doré’s work and his pictures of 
the Roc’s Egg and the Fisherman and 
the Genii bear witness to it. His| 
imagination at this time was the most 
attractive quality of his art. That it 
was more literary than artistic did 
not matter. The public loved it, 
praised Vedder, and hailed him as a 
genius. “I was proud while this first 
glimmer of Fame lasted. It soon 
wore off and I have never been proud 
since.” He was to reach higher than 
serpents and sphinxes, though the 


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swirl of the one and the mystery of 
the other were to remain with his art 
to the end. 

This was about 1864 and Vedder 
was twenty-eight. He was born in 
Varick Street, New York, in 1836. 
He was not a Yankee, as is often 
supposed, but a Dutchman of the 
Dutch. His boyhood was passed in 
New York. At seven he was taken 
to Cuba, then to Schenectady, and so 
backward and forward several times. 
His early education must have been 
limited. As a boy he had the humor 
for drawing and he was encouraged 
in this by his mother who wished him 
to be an artist. His first start was 
in an architect’s office, and after that 
he studied for some time with T. H. 
Matteson of Sherburne. At twenty 
he went to Paris and was in the 
Atelier Picot for eight months. That 
seems to have been the extent of his 
professional training. The rest he 



























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got by study of the masters. After 
Paris he went to Rome and Florence, 
staying in the latter city four years, 
meeting many persons of the Landor- 
Browning set and encountering vari- 
ous art influences. He speaks of talks 
with Inchbold about the art of the 
Pre-Raphaelites, thinks had be been 
born in England he might have been 
one of the P.R.B. The romance, the 
sentiment, the melancholy of the Pre- 
Raphaelites quite caught his fancy. 
And then he came back to New York 
and found the Civil War and hard 
times. He took a room in Beekman 
Street, and, quite unknown, started 
the struggle for recognition, now such 
a familiar part of artist-biography. 
It was then and there that he painted 
the Lair of the Sea Serpent, the Lost 
Mind, the Questioner of the Sphinx. 
These pictures shown at the exhibi- 
tions of the National Academy of 
Design soon brought him into notice 



























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and placed him above want, though 
he records that the Sea Serpent pic- 
ture—the most effective of the three 
—was sold for the modest sum of 
$300. 

In 1865, with the Civil War at an 
end—Vedder had tried to enlist but 
was rejected because of a defective 
arm—he started again for Paris. He 
stayed there (with trips to Brittany 
and England) for a year, and then 
went to Rome where he remained 
for the rest of his life, barring return 
visits to America, and a latter-day 


.~.|residence at Capri. Rome seemed to 


appeal to him, to be his proper en- 
vironment, and to furnish him sug- 
gestion and even inspiration. It was 
the city of romance, the Popes had 
lent it authority and the painters 
austerity, and Vedder was still de- 
voted to such things. He was also 
reaching out towards the mysterious. 
\“Tt delights me to tamper and potter 


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with the unknowable.” He had been 
much impressed by the drawings of 
William Blake and now in Rome he 
must have been mightily moved by 
the ceiling of Michelangelo. He does 
not say so in his book and there is 
nothing in his art that can be pointed 
out as directly emanating from Michel- 
angelo, and yet there is the same feel- 
ing of mystery and weirdness in the 
drawings for Omar Khayyam as in 
the Sistine ceiling. 

The Rubaiyat drawings will prob- 
ably always be considered Vedder’s 
masterpiece. The poetry of Omar, 
as paraphrased by FitzGerald, was 
particularly appealing to him. It had 
to do with “the unknowable,” it was 
a study in the mysteries, and it had 
a swing of sound that seemed to 
translate itself into a swirl of line, 
It fitted Vedder to a nicety and yet 
taxed his ingenuity to the utmost. 
The Rubaiyat was lofty poetry and the 






















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illustrator had to hitch his wagon to 
a star. But who shall now say which 
flew at the greater height—Omar or 
Vedder? How well the illustrator 
met and supplemented the poet! His 
work was well thought, well wrought, 
and well brought. It was magnificent. 
And if today there is no disposition 
to question the comparative worth of 
poem and illustration it is due per- 
haps to the fact that the two blend 
together and cannot be thought of 
as things apart. Vedder may have 
come to some fame through Omar’s 
poetry, but it can be said also that 
Vedder gave a new lease of life to 
the Rubatyat. 

At any rate, in these drawings he 
showed the stuff that was in him. 
His early work carried almost wholly 
by its literary or illustrative subject 
and its sense of the uncanny or the 
supernatural. The decorative in line 
or color or composition is not very 


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apparent in the Lost Mind, the Roc’s 
Egg and the Questioner of the 
Sphinx. But the decorative in the 
Omar drawings is most marked, 
Each sheet is arranged as a Japanese 
would arrange flowers in a vase; the 
figures are swung into place with 
beautiful outlines; the borders supple- 
ment and complement with profound 
grace. How rhythmical the network 
of lines that run and _ interplay 
throughout the pattern! 

The drawings were done on grey 
paper with black and white crayons. 
How decorative they are, with not 
a touch of color in them, and yet 
with the suggestion of color all 
through them. One wonders where 
Vedder got all this profound artistic 
knowledge. How did he learn to 
draw and model so well? How did 
he learn to see things all of a piece, 
do them all of a piece, hold a whole 
series together as a piece? He was 


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contemporary with La Farge, Inness, 
Homer Martin, Winslow Homer. 
Practically speaking, all of them were 
self-made and self-taught. They eked 
out their meagre technical training by 
study of the great masters, but their 
principal reliance was upon them- 
selves. Vedder was fortunate in 
being in Rome, in contact with great 
art, but when all is said and done the 
fact remains that his art is over- 
whelmingly Vedderesque—the expres- 
sion of his own individuality. The 
Vedder of the Omar drawings is the 
Vedder of the Lair of the Sea Serpent, 
only he had arrived at maturity in the 
Omar ‘and to his early imagination he 
now brought a very high artistic 
quality. The two together place him 
on a pedestal, in his own peculiar 
niche, and from that lofty place he 
will not be dislodged. 

I cannot speak of Vedder as a 
friend or companion because I knew 






















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him only as a casual acquaintance. 
Once or twice I met him in Rome, 
but we got no further than passing 
the time of day. Every one spoke 
highly of him, loved his frank genial 
personality, and to this day men 
continue to talk about him at his club 
and elsewhere; but I never was so 
fortunate as to be in his charmed 
circle. Nor can I speak about him 
as an Academician. He was elected 
a member of the Academy in 1908 
but during his fifteen years of mem- 
bership he lived in Italy and took 
no active part in the proceedings of 
the body. Still it was a satisfaction 
to know that his name was on the 
rolls. He was an honor to the Acad- 
emy, for he has always been an 
outstanding figure in American art. 
There is no reason why his success 
should not be our pride. 


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